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Isabella KenfieldFallen Banker with Ties to Citigroup Involved in Shooting of Brazilian Landless WorkersBy Isabella Kenfield May 26, 2009 On April 18, seven members of the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST) were shot by private security guards on a farm in the Amazon that belongs to Agropecuária Santa Bárbara Xinguara S/A, a company controlled by international banker Daniel Dantas. A billionaire with former ties to Citigroup, Dantas is Brazil's largest producer of cattle, and presently embroiled in a major financial and political scandal that reaches into the U.S. courts and financial system. The Dark Side of Brazil's Agribusiness Boom: Violence, Mutiny and Environmental Pillage in the AmazonIsabella Kenfield October 13, 2008 As Brazil's economy booms from rising agricultural commodity prices worldwide, conflicts over land in the Amazon-where the agricultural frontier is rapidly expanding-are also on the rise. At times, the region appears to be ungovernable for the administration of President Luis Inácio "Lula" da Silva and the governing Workers' Party (PT), which face strong pressure to yield to the interests of regional, national and international agribusiness. Since it came to power in 2003, the Lula government has been embroiled in a conflict between six large-scale rice growers and 19,000 indigenous people over 4.2 million acres of Amazon grassland, forest and river called Raposa Serra do Sol, in the northernmost state of Roraíma, on the border with Venezuela and Guiana. Today, the land dispute threatens to provoke a civil war in the region. Expansion of Biotechnology in Brazil Augments Rural ConflictsBy Isabella Kenfield
On March 7th—International Women's Day—dozens of Brazilian women occupied a research site of the U.S.-based agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, destroying the greenhouse and experimental plots of genetically-modified (GM) corn. Participants, members of the international farmers' organization La Vía Campesina, stated in a note that the act was to protest the Brazilian government's decision in February to legalize Monsanto's GM Guardian® corn, which came just weeks after the French government prohibited the corn due to environment and human health risks.
Taking on Big Cellulose: Brazilian Indigenous Communities Reclaim their Land By Isabella Kenfield With solidarity from landless and campesino movements, indigenous Tupinikim and Guarani communities in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo have successfully reclaimed their land from Aracruz Celulose S.A., a mammoth multinational cellulose company that illegally appropriated it in the 1970s. A NACLA investigation supported by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Fund finds that the growing unity of various factions of rural civil society, and their increasing militancy—especially as manifested in the tactic of nonviolent occupations—have greatly boosted the indigenous struggle. Corporate Murder in Brazil: Landless Rural Worker Shot by Security Company Hired by Multinational SyngentaBy Isabella Kenfield & Roger Burbach In the Brazilian state of Paraná, Valmir Mota de Oliveira of Via Campesina, an international peasant organization, was shot twice in the chest at point blank range by armed gunmen on an experimental farm of Syngenta Seeds, a multinational agribusiness corporation. The cold blooded murder took place on Sunday, October 21 after Via Campesina had occupied the site because of Syngenta’s illegal development of genetically modified (GM) seeds. Via Campesina and the Movement of the Landless Rural Workers (MST), the main Brazilian organization involved in Via Campesina’s actions, are calling the murder an execution, declaring, “Syngenta used the services of an armed militia.” Landless Rural Workers Confront Brazil's LulaVow to Continue Struggle for Land and Against Agribusiness Interests By Isabella Kenfield Last week the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) held its fifth National Congress in Brasília, the country's capital. 
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